


The Half-Life of Carbon

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-30
Updated: 2008-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-11 22:44:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney remembered when – fourteen years old and college-bound, possessed of a curiosity that could sear the inquisitive edges of those hapless fools who shared his classes – he gave serious consideration to the matter of sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Half-Life of Carbon

Rodney remembered when – fourteen years old and college-bound, possessed of a curiosity that could sear the inquisitive edges of those hapless fools who shared his classes – he gave serious consideration to the matter of sex. He was, he acknowledged, experienced in questions of arousal and ejaculation, not to mention creative in the act of jerking off – ambidextrous, a happy quirk by which mental acuity was mapped upon physical skill – but the actual act of sexual intercourse (broadly defined, with a leaning to classical definitions of intimate commingling, interchange, communication) was a mystery, a peculiar prize to be sought at the earliest opportunity, a ready and faintly baffling goal.

Because intercourse, when approached from the perspective of his expansive intellect, was a messy, embarrassing minefield of potential blackened eyes and strangled noises. His research – the only thing easier to procure than porn in his dormitory were cans of Old Milwaukee and bottles of Jagermeister – suggested sex was a damp, sweaty, vaguely animalistic enterprise, requiring balance that he wasn't sure he had. This held true no matter what kind of sex was sought out – straight, gay, or group – and was, unequivocally, a shockingly naked endeavor with very little payout when he considered that his hand had always proved sufficient thus far.

(He lost his virginity at nineteen to a young woman who was sweet and earnest and who didn't come. She patted his shoulder – _patted his shoulder_ – and told him she found it flattering that he ejaculated the moment she freed him from his pants. God.)

Grad school constituted his experimental years, he supposed – blow jobs given and received, a brief tangle with a dildo, the ability to wait until he was inside a woman to orgasm, the ability (which came afterwards) to coax a woman to orgasm, too. He was scrupulous in his use of condoms, let two different people tie him up, gamely spanked a lab partner in a broom closet one Thursday afternoon, and yet through it all – save for the moment when he came, when his body seized and he surrendered, briefly, to the shattering arc and twist of conjured pleasure – he couldn't shake the impression that the entire undertaking was ridiculous. So much effort for a few moments of happy grunting, and the aftermath, _god,_ the aftermath – the sticky, mortifying stains on his jeans and the disposal of prophylactics, the women who wanted to linger, the men who wanted to bolt. It was tiresome and perhaps a little addictive, and he really had no clue why evolution had selected this method of ensuring the survival of the species. It was entirely possible the human race was doomed and he was the only one who understood why.

Then John Sheppard kissed him, standing on a dirt path in one of the many forests that littered MX7-242, and his nervous system lit up like a filament shocked into incandescence by some unpredictable electrical current. "Well, shit," he managed when the kiss broke. His toes had curled. "My toes curled," he blurted. John fucking Sheppard just grinned.

He should, he reasoned later, have seen it coming. Ignoring the disparity in their respective career paths, their reactions to imminent danger, and the fact that Sheppard had been born in a nation of morons, there was a great deal they had in common – a ready enjoyment of video games, Monty Python, and roasted yak-like beasts; a curiosity about the Pegasus galaxy and the as-yet uncharted breadth of the Ancients' dumbass schemes; movies in which things exploded, team sports (albeit different kinds), and an aversion to sorting laundry before it was washed. Then there was the fact that he, if scrupulously adhering to the principles of evidence collection, had to admit he found Sheppard a great deal more than tolerable. In fact he enjoyed his company, actually _sought him out_ on more than one occasion, appreciated their banter and ready, matched insults, their shared knowledge of comic books and children's TV shows from 1974, and had, once or twice, eyed John's ass and thought it showed promise.

("I always look for you when I wake up sick," he mumbled into John's shoulder, late one night, sweat cooling on his skin. John had tugged the blankets up over them both and said, "Course," like it was understood, maybe a promise, and Rodney fell asleep with his knee pressed between John's thighs.)

It was difficult to concentrate on MX7-242 after the kiss in the woods, and twice there was a brief power failure in the main village because Rodney couldn't quite keep his mind on crystal formations when he knew how John's body felt pressed close and certain up against his. He almost jumped out of his skin when Teyla rested a hand on his shoulder, asked if she could be of any assistance, but manfully he resisted the urge to say, "explain everything to me, beginning to end, gamete to the sweet hereafter, because I have less than one clue what the hell I'm doing," and instead said, "Pass me the pliers with the yellow tips?"

The mission was successful, the trade of goods and services surprisingly equitable and accompanied by an absolute minimum of hot, bright tea and ritual bowing, and there were hours left in the day by the time they headed back toward the gate. "I can get in a run," Ronon said, content as he ambled along, twirling his gun on one finger, chewing on handful of _yapi_ fruit. The skull-bead on one of his dreads smiled happily in Rodney's direction.

"Kanaan and I will take Torren to the mainland," Teyla said, plucking a wildflower from the path. "Perhaps we will stay overnight, linger over breakfast in the village."

"You?" Ronon asked John, kicking at the back of his boot.

John shrugged, an innocent smile pasted on his face. "Nothing planned," he said, and glanced at Rodney, who promptly tripped, righted himself, said, "Motherfuck," and fell over again.

Because the plain fact was that his left thigh kept spasming whenever he looked at Sheppard's agile mouth, and it seemed that the near three decades of sexual study he could boast had left him unprepared and dangerously unequipped to think about mouths and walk in a straight line. This boded – there were gongs and bells and various tornado sirens sounding in his brain – because if he couldn't make it to the gate and find a little seclusion he could never think this through, and if he never thought this through he would never understand, and if he didn't understand it was entirely likely he would see Sheppard in the hall outside his quarters and ask, "Did you need to borrow that book?" and they would slip back into their life of ready banter and the whole thing would take on the eerie quality of a dream that would destroy Rodney's soul.

"I'll be alone," Rodney said hurriedly. "In my room. Tonight. Almost immediately after this, actually." And he strode ahead thinking foot, foot, foot and only took his weapon out of his holster once and even then didn't actually discharge it at a tree, though no one could possibly have blamed him under the circumstances. Foot, foot, foot.

Rodney's first time with a man had been the other guy's first time, too, and the whole thing had passed in a blur of nervous laughter and the agony of hair caught in a zipper. They both came – nothing could quench the libido of two twenty-one-year-olds who'd been drinking peppermint schnapps while running simulations on the internal stability of theoretical structures within space/time and sniggering at the word 'wormhole' every thirty seconds – but afterwards it was a little awkward and Jim said his balls stung and with that kind of accusation between them they didn't hook up again. There'd been seven guys, all told, of varying heights, ages, dispositions, and, once or twice, religious belief, and it was possible, Rodney thought, that if pressed to articulate a preference for a particular genital set-up, he'd go with cocks, although he wasn't entirely sure why.

(Statistics showed that he had more experience with penises than vaginas, but those results were hopelessly skewed by the dick he kept in his pants.)

John Sheppard had the irritating habit of making statistical analysis irrelevant – the sheer number of times he'd cheated death had caused more than one of Rodney's laptops to break down while calculating the probability than Sheppard could feasibly live to be sixty-five – and in matters of sexuality and sexual expression he was as predictable in his unpredictability as the half-life of carbon. He showed up at Rodney's quarters, holster still strapped to his thigh, and when Rodney came the moment John freed him from his pants, he moaned, "God, that was _hot_ ," and jerked and shuddered right there on his knees, stained his own pants and looked up at Rodney with a grin on his face that could only be described as sly.

Which is how it began, the chrysalis hours of Rodney's discovery, braced above John in one bed, then the next. There was some sort of alchemy in the touch of John's fingertips, in the hitch of his breathing, in the reverence with which John watched Rodney come. _This_ was worth it, the mess, the inconvenience, the stripped-bare intimacy of sharing a bed. He would wake with John's hands curled around his body, John's breath in his hair, John's knees tucked up against the backs of his own, could trust that John's body would open around his fingers, around his tongue, around his cock, and that John's laughter would welcome him, his body warm when winter drew in around them, quiet, grey, and cold.

And Rodney remembered himself as a fourteen-year-old genius, with books and computers and no earthly sense of what he would know once he slid beneath skin-warm sheets, the day showered away, the night a fragile maybe, broken by a radio call more often than not.

"Do you know," he whispered against John's shoulder, everything suddenly urgent and new. "You're . . . "

John rolled over and half-smothered him, limbs made clumsy with sleep. "Course," he whispered, pressing his forehead against Rodney's arm. "Same." And he yawned, breath chasing over Rodney's skin.

 _Same_ , Rodney thought, and laughed softly, feeling difference in his blood. "Yeah," he answered, and stored up every older memory to become mere anecdote, dusting out spaces where John might live.


End file.
